The complacency of Victorian England was shaken by a host of taboo-violating researchers who overturned traditional belief systems during the second half of the 19th century. Of these Charles Darwin had the most lasting impact on our worldview with The Origin of Species (1959) and The Descent of Man (1971). But a close second place prize goes to Karl Marx, who labored away on Das Kapital and other revolutionary works at the British Library during this same period. And let’s not forget Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough , which placed the Christian story of the resurrection in the context of ancient fertility rites and legends of dying-and-rising deities. Or Thomas Huxley, who invented the term agnosticis m in 1869.
What was the result of this intellectual ferment? Faith in Christian dogma clearly declined. But if you say that this spurred a rise of scientific thinking you only get half credit on the exam question. The very same generation of Brits that wrestled with these new theories at the close of the nineteenth century also embraced paganism and superstition with unprecedented fervor. Put another way: as theology got downgraded, a wide range of worldviews emerged to fill the gap. Scientism was just one part of the mix.
Thus we find Thomas Hardy flirting with paganism, even setting the key scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles at Stonehenge. Thus we encounter the neo-pagan poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne, in which Pan and Proserpine dislodge Jesus and Mary. Thus we find Arthur Conan Doyle professing his belief in fairies and ghosts. Thus we watch as W.B. Yeats promotes the Celtic revival. And when Yeats’s friend William Sharp launched a cutting-edge periodical in the closing years of the Victorian era, he signaled his seriousness by naming it The Pagan Review.
This is the context in which we should approach Arthur Machen's horror classic The Great God Pan (1890). Indeed, the story makes little sense in almost any other context. Could you imagine a modern novel in which a brain operation is designed with the goal of giving the patient a glimpse of the pagan deity Pan? That wouldn’t get out of the editor’s slush pile nowadays, but in 1890 the concept of pagan brain surgery was just the ticket.
In the opening pages of this story, Dr. Raymond invites his friend Clarke to witness this breakthrough operation. He plans to make a "slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all," he explains, "a trifling rearrangement of certain cells, a microscopical alteration that would escape the attention of ninety-nine brain specialists out of one hundred."
His subject is his loyal servant Mary. As a result of the procedure, she gets a look at the pagan deity Pan. And what exactly did she see? Don’t expect an explanation of that in the course of this book—those details are never provided, merely hinted at. Instead, Machen serves up the usual hyperbole of such tales, referring to the "most awful , most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken." Unlike Lovecraft and Poe , who will at least give us a few particulars of the terrors from beyond, Machen forces readers to make do with vague, over-heated words of scare-mongering—indeed, he finds opportunity to do so every few pages.
Mary survives the ordeal, but with the loss of her wits. She spends the rest of her days in an incoherent state, incapable of relating what she observed beyond the veil of everyday reality. "It is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot," Raymond is forced to admit. "However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan."
During the course of this short novel, many other victims will get a look at Pan—and always with disastrous results. London newspapers soon start covering a series of unexplained suicides among the upper class. What is the cause? Call it Pan-i-cide , if you must. But if you are looking for something more specific, you won't find it in these pages.
A handful of amateur investigators are intrigued by these mysterious cases, but the 'detectives' change almost as often as the ‘victims’ in this story. The narrative feels rushed and disjointed. Dr. Raymond and Mary are soon abandoned for a new plot about an orphan named Helen who is involved in a disappearance in a Welsh village. This tale is dropped a few pages later for another story about Villiers and his impoverished former schoolmate Herbert. This is soon supplemented with a disconnected story about a painter named Arthur Meyrick, who dies while traveling in South America. This is quickly followed by a new plot dealing with the suicide in London of Lord Argentine, and the subsequent copycat deaths of other members of the West Side upper crust.
On and on, Machen goes, never developing any of these characters, who all come across as even less substantial than a stereotype—at least a stereotype gives you some sense of what to expect. How can reader care about a victim, for example Lord Argentine, when the character is already dead when first encountered? Machen dispenses with even the most token efforts to establish an emotional connection between reader and the personages of The Great God Pan . As in the slasher movies of a hundred years later, these folks seem introduced merely to add to the body count.
This story was shocking in its day. The vague descriptions of unmentioned vices and horrors hint at practices that couldn't be described in Victorian literature, and Machen tries to get as much mileage out of these passages as possible. "It’s no use my going into details," a character says at one juncture, when describing the private life of a woman suspected of involvement in the suicides. Elsewhere her deeds are called "nameless infamies." When given a written account of these forbidden practices, one character declares "I will not read it"; another flings it to the ground. I’m sure this was scandalous stuff for a 19th century British reader, but I must frankly admit that I have absolutely no idea what it is implied by most of these scurrilous allusions. I don’t think Machen did either—he just wanted to seem edgy.
Although the story didn't shock me, I must admit that I am amazed by the frequency with which it has been described as a horror fiction classic. Both H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King have praised the work, although I note that the former also called it "absurd" and the latter lamented its "clumsy prose." I tend to side with an early reviewer of the story, critic Harry Quilter, who wrote: The Great God Pan "is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story."
The novella is comprised of eight short chapters. That would be sufficient for a compact story with a small number of characters. But this book packs too many plots into too few words. If Machen had given his characters a bit more life, before dealing them death, I might be more engaged. If he had offered more specifics about the "nameless infamies" and "most secret forces" at the heart of his story, I might have actually felt some of the terror he hoped to rouse. If he let me take a peek, ever so brief, at the formidable Pan, I might have had more patience for the many withheld details in his narrative. But Machen fails on all these counts.
Our modern word panic comes from the God Pan, and I don’t dismiss the possibility that the pagan deity could inspire a scary story. In fact, he already has. Check out The Bacchae by Euripides, which tells a similar story to the one Machen constructs. But in this instance, the pagan author handles pagan horror with much more credibility than the refined Victorian gentleman. Maybe Machen picked the right subject, but was just 2,300 years too late to make it plausible.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.